Fall Colors Intensive at Heartland Healing Center

Please pass this along to anyone you feel may benefit!

Dr. Michael Ryce is holding an Fall Colors four day workshop at his Heartland Healing Center in Theodosia, MO. It begins on October 14th and runs through the 17th, with the option for extending your time at the center, up to a nine day workshop.

I will be attending at the least the first four days of this event from the 14th through the 17th and I highly recommend Heartland and the work that is done there. I attended a nine day workshop at Heartland two years ago and I have repeatedly told people that it was the most beneficial workshop for personal growth and rejuvenation that I have attended in my 35 years of attending trainings, workshops and retreats, as a therapist/psychologist.

To visit Dr. Ryce's website click here: www.whyagain.com

To view a flier for the Fall Colors Intensive Workshop click here: Fall Colors Intensive

Please pass this along to anyone you feel may benefit!

Healing Through Relationships Part 1

Last night the Mindshifters group watched the first half of the lecture by Dr. Michael Ryce titled, Healing Through Relationships. Dr. Ryce begins by telling how the lecture used to be titled, Healing Your Relationships, until he discovered that there is no such thing as a broken relationship, since each relationship and interaction can be seen as a tool for uncovering anything that is less than Love within ourselves. Once we discover that we have hidden something less than Love inside of ourselves then we can use the tools we have learned to dismantle that false and negative reality and restore our awareness to the fact that we are Love.

This process is made even easier by the fact that once we recognize that we are the ones creating whatever negative emotion or reaction we experience, we stop blaming others, and then we are free to ask them for support as we explore and heal our negative realities. Approaching relationship in this way is completely foreign to most people, but results in a collaborative approach to communication and relationship, rather than a competitive approach to communication and relationship. When there is a competitive approach to relationship I find myself thinking, "I am much more balanced and emotionally stable than you are." "I am right about this and you are sadly mistaken."

When there is a collaborative approach to relationship and "Responsibility Communication", I take responsibility for everything I am feeling and I stay focused on my ability to create what I am experiencing. So that when I am uncomfortable, or sad, or angry, or hurt, or confused, I realize that I need to focus on how I am creating that experience if I am to change it. Then I can ask for the Love and support of my friend or family member as I take the time to change and heal the false negative reality within my mind.

I can tell you from personal experience that it is much less stressful to explore my hurt with a collaborative partner, than it is to confront my hurt by attacking and blaming the person I feel caused it!

This lecture tied beautifully into the lecture by Guy Finley which we listened to last week. One of the key points in Guy Finley's talk was that because we have become so focused on acquiring what it is we think will give us peace and freedom from fear, we have come to the point where we view everyone else as either a suspect or a prospect. We either want to blame others for causing our emotional pain and frustration, or we see them as someone who can take away our emotional pain and frustration. This leaves us with the following summary statement; "All attempts at acquisition are the bitter fruit of an imitative life". When one realizes that there is nothing missing within the Self, there is no desire for acquisition.

We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.

Operation Emotional Freedom

If you know anyone suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, (PTSD), you need to send them this link.

The video from Gary Craig, the creator of The Emotional Freedom Technique, (EFT), is now available at the following website:
http://www.operation-emotionalfreedom.com/dvd.php

This powerful video documents the story of veterans suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, and how they are being helped by learning to use EFT to eliminate the symptoms of nightmares, flashbacks, rage, confusion, paranoid thoughts, alcohol and drug abuse, broken relationships and more. This movie began in 2008 with veterans volunteering to try this approach. These veterans and their families thought there was no help for the life threatening symptoms they had as a result of being in combat situations. The movie documents the results they got in five days of treatment and the benefits which lasted a full year later when they were interviewed for followup.

Please help spread the word about this low cost, highly effective, self-empowering tool for resolving the effects of a past trauma, whether the trauma was combat related or from any other situation. This tool and its powerful healing benefits are simply too important to be kept secret, or to be ignored.

You can also go to the EFT website, www.eftuniverse.com to learn more about the actual procedure and download a free manual which shows you how to perform EFT for yourself or a loved one. Please note that if someone has been in a combat situation, or any other severely traumatic situation, they may need to support of a therapist who is trained in EFT or other Energy Psychology, or Mind/Body energy techniques in order to benefit from this process.


Please help those who have served our country and sacrificed more than any of us can truly know, by helping to spread the word about this powerful tool which is transforming lives and healing the effects of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, (PTSD).

Dr. Michael Ryce - A New Beginning, and Guy Finley - Leaving Happy Valley

Last week and this week, the Mindshifters group watched a lecture by Dr. Michael Ryce titled A New Beginning: A lesson from A Course In Miracles, www.whyagain.com, and we listened to a story by Guy Finley about a woman who lived in "Happy Valley" and was trying to leave and "move on" with her life, www.guyfinley.com.

One of the essential messages from Dr. Ryce's talk was the idea that if I want things to be different in my life, I have to find a way to do things differently. Therefore, if I rely on the same processes of my thinking and logical mind which produced the situation I am in, I am not likely to find a result that is any different than what I have already produced. My unhappiness or discomfort in any moment is the result of what I have chosen to focus my awareness upon. If I keep focusing my awareness on the outside events and what others are saying and doing, and assume that these things are causing what I am feeling, then I am doomed to continue feeling the same kind of pain and discomfort.


Dr. Ryce relates that A Course In Miracles suggests that I decide "Today I will make no decisions by myself. I will make decisions with my life today, instead of my past." Then throughout the day I should tell myself the kind of day I want to have, and keep reminding myself of the kind of experience I want to have. Then when things begin to happen that don't seem to produce in me the kind of experience I want to have, it is suggested that I say to myself, "I have no question. I forgot what to decide." This will keep me from the pattern of automatic response based on my past experiences, which has produced discomfort and unhappiness within me, every time something like this has happened in my past.

It is also suggest that when I am unhappy or uncomfortable in any way that I say, "I hope I have been wrong." Because the Truth is that happiness does not depend on being right. Happiness depends on being Love! If I can get myself to realize that no matter how hard I have worked at proving that "I am right!", it has not led me to being happy, then I can begin to suspect that there may be another way to look at my situation.

Guy Finley tells the story of the woman who lives in Happy Valley and is no longer satisfied with her life. She decides to "move on". She tells her friends that she is going to leave Happy Valley and they tell her she can't because there are guards. She thinks this is silly because she has never seen any guards. She then realizes that she has never tried to leave before and so maybe that is why she never noticed any guards. She decides to think about this for a while and gives up the idea of leaving Happy Valley. But eventually she gets tired of all the tension, frustration, gossip, competition, anger, pride, and sadness which define her life in Happy Valley and once again decides she needs to leave and "move on".

When she finally tries to walk out of the valley, she is confronted by someone walking towards her from a distance. This scares her her and she decides to go back to her house and think it over. Eventually a number of years have passed and she has gone through several attempts to leave the valley and each time she did, the person confronted her sooner and sooner, until she finally saw that the person was actually someone who looked just like her. Finally she decided to confront the person face to face and when she did she realized it was just a mirror. She was relieved at first, but then scared again when she tried to walk around the mirror and it moved to be in front of her. Eventually she gave up trying to go around the mirror and went home.

After many attempts to sneak out of the valley and finding that the mirror was confronting her sooner and sooner each time she tried, she opened her door one day to leave and the mirror was in her doorway. She got so angry she threw a stone at the mirror and the mirror was not harmed at all. In fact, the stone bounced off and hit the woman. With great fear and frustration, she reached out to touch the mirror and when she did her finger passed right through the mirror. She instantly felt all manor of strange sensations - many of them were not comfortable. She wanted to run away again but there was nowhere left to run. So she pushed her finger further into the mirror, fighting back the fear and "pain" and realized that this mirror was a passageway to some other place.

With great fear and doubt she pushed forward and walked right into the mirror. Instantly she was transported to another place, outside of Happy Valley.

Guy Finley then talks about how the resistance we feel is greatest just before the moment of transformation. He discusses how we have been tricked into thinking that emotional pain is the same as physical pain and that the proper thing to do is avoid it, rather than sit with it and explore it. This simply leaves us in the same cycle as the woman who wanted to leave Happy Valley, repeating the same useless escape mechanisms over and over again. In truth, the resistance, emotional pain and discomfort we feel is the signal that something has come along to reveal to us something about ourselves which is keeping us from moving forward and knowing Life more completely. The Truth is that we can release those things within us which keep us from knowing Life more completely, only by accepting them as simply self-caused, by the process of avoiding and denying resistance.

We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.

Dr. Michael Ryce's lecture on "Healing Through Relationships"

This week we watched the first half of Dr. Ryce's lecture on the healing power of relationships. The lecture makes the point that relationships are not bad, broken, or diseased. Relationships are sacred tools which reveal to us what it is, inside each of us, that we have denied and suppressed. We deny and suppress things because they are painful or scary, and these are the things which will keep creating pain and fear in our lives until we own them, and dismantle them from our thought. Dr. Ryce suggests that the traditional purpose for relationships in our world has been to see how much stuff we can accumulate, and who can be proven to be "right". He offers that the way to begin using the healing power of relationships begins with adopting a new purpose for relationships; "I want to heal." This changes everything about how we approach relationships, and what we can learn from them.

Guy Finley states in his Seven Steps to Oneness program that: "Before we can change our experience of life, we must change our purpose for living."

This is a fundamental truth which arises from the awareness that we each create our own realities from the selective attention we place on the actuality of life which happens around us. When we choose a focus for our attention and we decide to set a goal or a purpose, that goal or purpose filters what we see, hear, and feel, and motivates our behavior in an attempt to accomplish that goal or purpose. Once we set a goal or purpose, it stays active in us until we achieve it or consciously cancel it. Therefore a goal or purpose can be driving our behavior, and experience, long after we have shifted our conscious awareness away from it and onto something else.

This makes it very important to consciously choose the purpose/goal we have for being in a relationship, and to frequently remind ourselves of that purpose/goal. When we do this with the understanding that we are creating our own experiences and our internal realities, and that no one else is causing any of our emotions, or thoughts, whether positive or negative, we can begin to make good use of the tool of relationship for healing those thoughts and emotions that "come up" within us that are less than Love. Dr. Ryce offers a tool for using relationships to heal at www.whyagain.com/commitment.php


We come from Love, we are made of Love, we are Love. Everything else is false.